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Linus Torvalds rates his own words 'incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man'

Defying expectations, kernel devs roared back to work

Linux lead Linus Torvalds has labelled his last pronouncement on the state of the kernel "the incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man."

Torvalds' criticism of himself came after his prediction that the last seven days would be a slow time for kernel development.

"So in the rc2 announcement notes I thought we might have a slow week for rc3 as well due to people just coming back from vacations and it taking some time for bug reports etc to start tricking [sic – Ed] in," he wrote.

"That turned out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy old man.”

"Because while the week started out fairly slow, you guys certainly showed me, and the final rc3 ends up being on the bigger side as rc3s go. Not ‘beating records’ big, but certainly bigger than average. So instead of some slow start due to the holidays, I think we saw some pent-up fixes."

In this week’s kernel announcement notes, Torvalds said the last week’s efforts mean that version 5.11 of the Linux kernel is now on a typical development track.

“So I think on the whole everything looks normal for this release, and my theory that maybe we'll need an extra release candidate just for the holiday impact was just wrong,” he wrote.

“Of course, we may end up with extra rc candidates if some nasty development issue rears its ugly head later, but for now it all looks fine.” Which means we can probably expect another four or five release candidates, before a late February release.

Torvalds said the changes delivered over the last week aren’t particularly exciting or notable, but nonetheless encouraged testing. ®

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